Armchair Travel Goes Only So Far

PRACTICAL TRAVELER

February 5, 1989|By Jonathan Yardley

For a variety of reasons with which many readers doubtless will sympathize - a lack of funds, an aversion to aviation, a settled domesticity - I've never been much of a traveler. Once, several years ago, I talked about this with a friend who had been around the world with numerous stops along the way, and apologized to her for my blatant provincialism. ''Oh, yes,'' she said with admirable tact, ''but you've been around the world in books. That's travel of a sort, and broadening in its way.''

It was a kind remark - and a dangerous one, for it comforted me in my insularity and gave me an excuse to perpetuate it. My friend had allowed me to convince myself that to read Garcia Marquez is to tour Latin America, to read Dickens is to walk the streets of London, to read Conrad is to float down the rivers of Africa. Who needs to travel, I asked myself, when the entire world is right there on the shelves, within the pages of the innumerable books that have been my Baedeker's?

I was, if anything, confirmed in this belief in 1987 when business took me to California and Hawaii, both for the first time. San Francisco looked quite as I had expected it to, and so too did Kauai; certain flora of Northern California did catch me by surprise, to be sure, but on the whole what I saw was what I'd been looking for. So I came home and soon settled into the same comfortable old rut, with no sense that there was any particular point to climbing out of it.

Now, though, I have been to London, and it has taught me an invaluable lesson: However close one may be brought to another place by a book or a film or a television broadcast, there is in fact no substitute for the real thing. London is not an imaginary construct but a real place, and no amount of book-reading or film-watching can wholly prepare one for its actuality. The point of my visit, I realized when it ended a week ago, was not everything I had expected to find, but everything that surprised me and thus forced me to refabricate the picture of this great city that for years I had kept in my mind.

As is true for everyone who comes for the first time to a universally famous place, London in certain respects was precisely as anticipated. The superiority of its theater, the variety of its shops, the majesty of Westminster Abbey and the buildings of Parliament, the riches of its book shops, the room temperature of its beers and ales, the reserved courtesy of its citizens - all of this, and more, produced not surprise but the pleasant sensation of familiarity, of being at last in a place one has known all one's life and finding it true to itself.

In that sense my trip confirmed what I had been taught over the years by Dickens and Boswell and Greene, not to mention innumerable films and broadcasts. But what I will remember far longer - what taught me a lasting lesson about the limits of armchair travel - was the utterly unexpected. Nothing, for example, had prepared me for the greenness of London in January. To an American flying in from the brown and wintry Northeast, the great grassy expanse of Hyde Park seems so brightly green as to be viewed through tinted glasses. It takes only a moment's reflection to understand why - Britain's temperate climate, its frequent rainfall, its ring of water - but this contradiction of the received wisdom that London in winter is gray and gloomy was, to put it mildly, instructive.

So too was the city's architecture and urban landscape. Years of reading Dickens and Boswell, of admiring the drawings and paintings of Hogarth, had left me with the belief that for all its modernization, London remains at the core Dr. Johnson's city. Yet it is not that at all. One finds glimpses of the mid-18th century here and there, in tiny streets and hidden squares, but London today is essentially a Georgian, Victorian and Edwardian city, with all too much late-20th-century concrete and glass. Mr. Pickwick's London is as rare as Peter Stuyvesant's New York: a museum piece rather than a part of the city's daily life.

This is not a criticism - quite to the contrary, Georgian London is magnificent - but a discovery, one that surely must astonish many other visitors much as it did me: London is an imposing city physically, and in areas such as Chelsea and Belgravia an uncommonly beautiful one, but it is not the place that books or films prepare one for. The same must be said of the eccentric British attachment to right-hand driving: As a passenger in taxis I was quite unperturbed by this deviation from universal logic, but as a pedestrian I was - at certain all-too-memorable moments - terrified by it.